What is the priority queue with an example?

You can understand this with an example given in Fig 1 of a printer and a few jobs where jobs are waiting to use the printer to complete their print job on a LAN system.

We have declared a few priorities say 1, 2, 3, and 4 which are attached to the jobs of a supervisor, teacher, students, and outside users respectively.

Now if a job is started with a priority p then it is immediately inserted at the end of the other jobs with priority p. And for p = 1, 2, 3, and 4 jobs are always removed from the front place of the queue.

priority_queue
Fig1: Priority Queue: What is the priority queue with an example

In a generalized language, we can conclude that a priority queue is a series of queues where we already know the priority of each element associated with the queue.

Fig 1.1 below shows the representation of a single priority queue into four separate queues, each of them following a FIFO technique.

queueaccordingpriority
Queue based on priority

When the first queue is empty then only the element of the second queue will be removed. In the same manner, the element of the third queue will be removed only when the first and second queues are empty, and so on.

This representation of a single priority queue into a series of queues also suggests an efficient storage scenario of a priority queue. based on priority, the element is always added at the end of the queue when they are supposed to be added.

If only a single sequential structure is used for the priority queue then at the time of insertion a new element must be inserted in the middle of the queue.

This can require the movement of several elements. Thus it is a better option to split the priority queue into several queues. in which each one will have its storage structure.

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Conclusion:

In general, a queue is known to store the element in a series and is inserted at one end and removed from another end. If we can make this insertion and deletion of the element based on the prior priority of each element then this type of queue is known as a priority queue.|What is the priority queue with an example|

So, using this blog post we have gone through What is a priority queue with an example? What is a priority queue used for? What are the types of priority queues? What is the difference between a queue and a priority queue?

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